Brian Zafron: I Eat Web 2.0 for Breakfast

 

“Interactive marketing is the ability to address the consumer, remember what the consumer says and address the consumer again in a way that illustrates that we remember what the consumer has told us.”- John Deighton, Harvard, 1996

With the growth of portable and on-demand technologies, marketers are forced to deal with an increasingly elusive consumer. Bombarding consumers with advertisements is unfortunately not the easy, fix-it-all solution, but rather, it makes matters worse – causing further desensitization and sometimes flat-out resentment.

The trick, evidenced by trends in marketing departments and acquisitions across the world, is including the consumer in the conversation. Here we find the most effective breed of targeted advertising – where the target is also the one taking aim. No one likes being spoken “at” or spoken “to.” Adults, children, extra-terrestrials. No one.

Take Friday’s acquisition of Hot or Not as evidence to the effectiveness of interactivity. The website’s excruciatingly simple functionality is based upon users ranking randomly selected pictures of men and women according to hotness (or notness.) The buyers are investors connected with Avid Life Media, and paid somewhere around $20 million for the site. Moreover, Hot or Not has spurred many generations of knock-offs, most recently Web Hot or Not, created by Technorati founder, David Sifry.

Interactivity is even bleeding into Superbowl commercials. (Click here to watch dem suckers). Sit tight, and let me hit you with some examples:

• The cute girl who sang “Message From Your Heart” in the Doritos spot was featured because she won an online, consumer-generated video content.
• Tide’s talking stain commercial, promoting the Tide Pen, called upon consumers to participate online by sharing their own stories.
• GoDaddy’s spot showed someone at a Super Bowl party visiting their website in order to see content that could not be shown on TV, a subtle little invitation to do likewise. The result: GoDaddy turned a 30 second TV spot into a significantly more lengthy engagement. They recorded a half-million site visitors in the first 30 minutes after the spot, with traffic up 2,434 percent compared to last year’s Super Bowl.

So what does all this mean for marketers? Well, it’s simple: engage the consumer. How? Well, that’s a bit more complicated.

Check back for tomorrow’s article: “10 Outrageously Helpful Tips To Succeed At Interactive Marketing”

www.brianzafron.com/blog/2007/02/12/Interactive-Marketing-Is-The-Tsunami-Of-The-Future:-Take-Shelter!